Information the most valuable commodity in the world. All human progress depends on the accumulation and preservation of information. When information is lost, human progress suffers. This infographic displays some of the most significant loses of information human civilization has suffered.

The circular timeline shows the data disaster events in chronological order, while also connecting to their geographic locations. The triangles are proportionally sized so readers can visually compare the modern data equivalents between the events. This really helps put the disasters into perspective for the audience.

A great infographic design that tells one story really well, but there are a few things I would recommend to improve the design:

I wouldn’t have any of the triangles run off the page, because the audience will lose perspective on how disastrous those specific events were. Show the full impact of those events to the readers.

Add the URL directly to the infographic landing page so readers can find the original full-size version when people don’t link back correctly

I wouldn’t list Wikipedia as a data source if possible. Track the Wikipedia references back to the original data source to include in the list.

The graph below shows how 24 of the most active subreddits have changed over time. I ordered the subreddits by the time that they first appeared on Reddit. I recommend zooming in so you can see it better.

(I should note that I purposely excluded /r/reddit.com from this graph because it dominates the entire graph until about 2008, then screws things up again when it got closed down in late 2011.)

The biggest thing that you may notice is that there were very few subreddits from 2006-2008. In fact, there was only one subreddit before 2006 (/r/reddit.com). The majority of the content in 2006-2008 was focused on more techie-friendly subjects: programming, science, politics, entertainment, and gaming. Major subreddits dedicated to solely picture and video content started becoming popular in mid-2008, and even then their posts only comprised less than 1/4 of Reddit’s content. It wasn’t until 2011 did the picture-related subreddits really start taking over, and Reddit never looked back after that.

This graph covers so many changes in the Reddit community that it can’t explain what happened by itself. In the following sections, I will take a closer look at how the Reddit community evolved on a year-by-year basis.

Love these data visualizations of the reddit’s evolution over time from Randy, a 3rd year Computer Science graduate research assistant at Michigan State University. In his original post, he actually visualizes each year separately, and you can see some major milestones and clear changes in the reddit universe.

The Great /r/reddit.com Spike of 2009

The total growth of reddit over the years is lost in the 100% Stacked Area chart; however, you can clearly see the growth of subreddit content as a portion of the whole.

It’s a bird…It’s a plane…It’s Superman! Well, not Superman himself, but it IS a super awesome Superman infographic.

2013 is THE year for everyone’s favorite Man of Steel. Between it being the hero’s 75th anniversary, and Man of Steel hitting the silver screen on June 14th, we’re bursting with red and blue excitement! Thankfully, we were able to use our energy for good rather than evil, and create a visual guide to the evolution of Superman’s iconic emblem.

We cover the logo’s various incarnations in both comics and popular culture, starting with its first appearance in 1938 and culminating with what the famed “S” will look like when Henry Cavill reveals it on on his Clark Kent-ee chest in theaters in a little over a week!

Love this. The visual images clearly show the readers how dramatically the logo has changed over the years in both comics and film.

The footer should include a copyright statement and the URL link back to the infographic landing page. Readers need to be able to find the original full-size version from the publisher when people share the infographic on other sites without linking back.

What a wild year it’s been. You could say that 2013 was the year of social media and you’d be correct. What was once a novelty for people bored and surfing on the ‘net has risen to be an industry in and of itself that companies large and small have embraced around the world as a powerful cornerstone of their marketing initiatives.

In case you got lost in the details of 2013, we’ve laid out all the notable moments of the year, month by month, in this handy infographic.

There are a handful of statistics listed in the design that should have been visualized instead of just shown in text. The use of logos and images from the web do a good job of showing the specific events.

A meticulously illustrated catalog of 100 landmark cameras, culled from over a century of photographic history, depicting both professional and consumer models and tracing photography’s history from the first models to today’s digital wonders.

The Genealogy of Baseball Teams chronicles the origin and evolution of baseball teams from every major league from the inception of the National League in 1876 to the present day. Trace the fascinating histories of the Boston Red Caps to the Altanta Braves from the Washington Senators to the Minnesota Twins from the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Printed poster available for purchase from HistoryShots is 42” x 20”, and starts at $36.

The history of rock music is pretty interesting. Everyone knows that it’s roots lie in genres like Gospel, but what about all the other genres?

How did Cowpunk come about? Or Indie Rock? Or Nu Metal?

These are the sorts of questions we ask ourselves here at Concert Hotels (oh, and other important topics like what we should have for lunch).

Curiosity piqued, we decided to trace the roots of the various rock genres, kinda like ‘Who do you think you are?’ but for rock music, and then visualize it.

We embarked upon what turned into a mammoth research task, the likes of which none of us have undertaken since college. But we stuck with it. We think it was worth the effort.

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you our Rock Time Machine - click here to journey through 100 years of rock in less than a minute.

And there’s more - while we were at it we thought it might be pretty cool to be able to hear a sample of each genre.

So turn your speakers up to 11 (or pop your headphones in if you’re the considerate type) - you never know, you might just find a new music genre to fall in love with.

Although music heritage isn’t an exact science, the color-coded flow arrows are easy to follow throughout the design. However, they get more complicated at the bottom. Apparently there hasn’t been any new music since Y2K?

A Productive Day in the Life of a Social Media Marketer from Razor Social is a great use of an infographic design within a larger content strategy online. The larger piece is an article that lists out all 29 tools, with links and descriptions, but the infographic shows a character using all of the tools throughout the day. So the infographic grabs the attention of the audience and gets shared frequently, with links back to the full article.

The demands on us to market our products and services using social media is constantly increasing and the technology/tools required to support this is also increasing.

We start early morning and we finish late at night. How many of you check your Twitter or Facebook account last thing in the evening and first thing in the morning?

So we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at a very busy day in the life of a Social Media Marketer. During the day there are so many tools and tasks. If you work alone then we certainly wouldn’t expect you to do everything listed here or use all the tools we suggest, but if you are part of a team then you could share out the tasks and tools to make it easier.

A special thanks goes to Donna from Socially Sorted who is my go to person when I want anything visual done. Thanks Donna.

The infographic design does a good job of removing most of the text descriptions and just using icons and logos to represent the various tool. Interested readers can dig into the full article for more information.

The footer is missing the URL link back to landing page with the article. When people post infographics on blogs and social media sites, they aren’t always good about linking back to the original. By including the text URL in the infographic itself, you can make sure all of the readers can find the landing page.

Thanksgiving Timed Right is a timeline infographic from allrecipes.com that helps everyone plan when to start cooking each dish for Thanksgiving dinner. You want everything to make it to the table at the same time right? I especially appreciate the Wine Breaks!

Great idea, and I know many, many people that struggle to figure this out on their own. As an infographic released on the web, it really needs to have the URL back to the original full-size version included in the footer. Many people are going to share this infographic with friends and family, but very few with correct link back to the Fresh Bites Blog where you can find the original.

The topic choice here is fantastic! This design will have an Online Lifespan of many years as people go looking for this information every November.

Apple Release Patterns is a new personal project of mine, and you can find the full-size original versions on a new, dedicated landing page on the InfoNewt.com site. Every few months Apple releases a new product update or redesign, and the rumors start flying about what the upcoming product will be during the preceding weeks. For better or worse, those speculations are often based on what was released in the same timeframe the prior year.

This data visualization lines up vertical columns for each year, starting with 2007. I decided that anything further back wasn’t really relevant to Apple’s current practices. Each product release is then mapped onto the calendar, showing a pattern (or lack of pattern) to the product releases. If the product announcement was separate from the actual release date, I mapped that date as well.

This data was ripe for a visualization. When I tried to look at the historical dates of product releases, the information was scattered across multiple sites, confusing and difficult to gather. Some information was contradictory, which required further investigation. So, the data topic itself was a good target for a clear, easy-to-understand visualization. However, the design with all of the products was too complicated visually to perceive any defining patterns. So, I created separate versions that break out the products into 3 categories, and those are much easier for readers to see the patterns.

For iOS devices (iPod, iPad, iPhone and AppleTV) you can see the pattern shift in 2011 for most of the products to a Fall timeframe. You can also see a recently consistent announcement date with the product release the following Friday.

For Apple’s laptop line, the MacBooks, you can see the MacBook Air has become a regular release during the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, and the MacBook Pro gets fairly regular updates twice a year, usually just to update the internal specifications.

The desktop Mac line doesn’t seem to show much pattern at all. They might get an update each year, but the timing is erratic. Sometimes they are part of WWDC, sometimes part of the Fall iOS events, and sometimes completely on their own.

I’m going to keep updating these on the landing page as Apple releases new products in the future (upcoming iPad Mini 2 Retina and Mac Pro still need to start shipping this year). I want these to become a valuable resource every time the Apple rumor mill heats up about the next product announcement. If you use the embed code on the Apple Release Patterns landing page, your site will also display the updates automatically as they become available.

This is version 1.0. I have some ideas and improvements I want to make in future versions, but I would love to hear your thoughts as well. Post any suggestions or feedback in the comments below.